McDonalds Tells Workers To Budget By Getting A Second Job And Turning Off Their Heat

1:03 pm - 07/15/2013

McDonalds has partnered with Visa to launch a website to help its low-wage workers making an average $8.25 an hour to budget. But while the site is clearly meant to illustrate that McDonalds workers should be able to live on their meager wages, it actually underscores exactly how hard it is for a low-paid fast food worker to get by.

The site includes a sample”‘budget journal” for McDonalds’ employees that offers a laughably inaccurate view of what it’s like to budget on a minimum wage job. Not only does the budget leave a spot open for “second job,” it also gives wholly unreasonable estimates for employees’ costs: $20 a month for health care, $0 for heating, and $600 a month for rent. It does not include any budgeted money for food or clothing.

Basically every facet of this budget is unachievable. For an uninsured person to independently buy health care, he or she must shell out on average $215 a month — just for an individual plan. If that person wants to eat, “moderate” spending will run them $32 a week for themselves, and $867 a month to feed a family of four. And if a fast food worker is living in a city? Well, New York City rents just reached an average of $3,000 a month.

The sample budget is also available in Spanish. On another section of the site, it concludes, “You can have almost anything you want as long as you plan ahead and save for it.”

Neither McDonalds nor Visa returned requests for comment by the time of publication.Last year, Bloomberg News found that it would take the average McDonalds employee one million hours of work to earn as much money as the company’s CEO. This immense wage disparity in the fast food industry has sparked a series of protests and walk-outs by low-wage workers working at fast food chains around the country — in New York, Chicago, Washington, and Seattle, to name a few cities, workers from chains including KFC, McDonalds, Burger King, and Taco Bell have spoken publicly about the need for serious wage increases across the industry.

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This budget is complete and utter bullshit. As the article states, it's got nothing for utilities, food, or clothing. It's also missing things like internet, transportation (gas for the car, or bus fare), personal care (hair cuts, etc), or entertainment. Here's a real budget:

Item

Amount

Notes

Rent/Mortgage

1000

A more reasonable amount than the $600 mentioned. I know I'm paying more, but I live in the Bay Area.

Food

400

$100/week for a 4-week month or $80/week for a 5-week month. Assuming 3 meals a day, that gives you $4.75/meal or $3.80/meal, which is doable.

Utilities

150

Gas, electrical, water, etc. In some places this would be a lot more.

Car Payment

150

Again, I know I'm paying more.

Car upkeep

200

Gas, maintenance, etc.

Auto Insurance

100

Mobile phone

100

Ditching the loltastic "cable/phone" category in favor of something people will actually have.

Clothing allowance

50

I typically don't spend my clothing allowance every month, I save it up and buy clothes once a quarter. But you have to buget for it.

Health Insurance

215

Using the figure from the article

Entertainment

50

Once a month, go to a movie. Or go out for dinner. Or have drinks with friends. (But just ONE, because bootstraps.)

Misc Expenses

100

Laundry, hair cuts, random shit like parking tickets, etc.

Savings

100

lol

Total

2765

oops

And of course that's for one person. Got kids? Just about every one of those categories will increase, and you'll get to add new categories like child care, health care copays (for regular preventative visits to doctor and dentist), school supplies & expenses, birthday and holiday presents, etc.

I scratched out my own budget and found much the same story. I even slashed out the entertainment category, and car payment (assumed public transit), and reduced food to $20/week (I've done it, but expect to eat a lot of watery soup), and I still came up several hundred over the McDonald's budget.

TBH I'd like to see the CEO's budget. What's so important that he can't share some of his $8.75 million/year?

If you get rid of the car payment and add public transit, that's still a hundred bucks a month where I live. Which is less than most car payments and insurance but still a ton of money for someone working fast food.

And that assumes your local public transportation will get you everywhere you need to go, most notably work and grocery shopping, in a reasonable amount of time. (Says the guy who used to have a 2-hour EACH WAY commute by bus.)

This reminds me of this article. CEOs make a lot more than $250,000 a year, but the point of the article was to lash back at President Obama, who has used the figure repeatedly at the threshold at which you start being rich (and therefore need to start giving more of your money to taxes).

The article tried to make it look like the family making $250,000 was just struggling to stay afloat, because their income taxes alone were double this McD's worker's yearly salary from Job 1. "Their spending is conservative," says MSN. Budget line items

-Maxing out the 401(K) contributions (I guess McD's workers don't deserve to save for retirement)-$8,000 a year to save for their kids' college educations-$4,000 a year on after-school activities (the McD's worker didn't even get childcare budgeted in there)-What amounted to a $3,000/month mortgage, which would get you about a $500,000 house-$600/monthly car payments-A $3,000/year clothing budget and a $1,200 a year dry cleaning budget-One family trip at $4,000 (poor Jonses!)-$3,000 per year on gifts, which amounts to $750 per person in the 4-person family

"Not included are those hefty run-of-the-mill payouts for charitable deductions, life insurance premiums, disability insurance, legal fees - or monthly sessions at a colorist, or a gym membership." I mean, woe is the $250,000+ earner who can't get her roots bleached every month, right?

Right? Or not have a car and stop eating, because who needs luxuries like that.

(I think in the interests of full disclosure I should say that my current budget is nowhere near this tight, but for a decade these sorts of spreadsheets represented my life quite accurately while I was unemployed or underemployed. I'm doing okay now, but I still remember what it was like to have to make those decisions every. fucking. month.)

I figured out my budget because I was curious since I live in a small Midwest town, where things are cheaper. With all of that, plus student loan payment, prescription co-pays, and other such things, I came out way over the McDonald's budget. No wonder all the fast food workers in this area live in the roach infested apartments.

I live in NYC, and my monthly budget is 2000/mth per person. It's slightly cheaper in a city with public transportation (car upkeep/payments and auto insurance is cancelled out) my rent includes utilities which helps too. I have zero savings though and no healthcare plan ._.;;

Hardly. As I said it works out to $4.75 a meal for a 4-week month, or $3.80/meal for a 5-week month. That's not at all extravagant and pretty much assumes you're buying very few pre-prepared foods and cooking most everything from scratch.

Still though, feel free to cut it by 50%. At $200/month for groceries the numbers still don't match with the fictional budget proposed by McDonalds.

Of course if you're making minimum wage you're not spending $400 a month on food because you can't afford to.

That doesn't mean that that's not what food costs, though. I live in New York, and even though me and my husband drive into northern New Jersey to buy food twice a month, a food run for us can still easily cost $200 and that's if we also don't need household supplies.

When I was living alone I maybe spent $250 a month on food, but that's if you didn't include eating out and maybe getting lunch at work. And if you're working 80 hours a week and flying between McD's and the movie theater, when do you have time to make yourself a sandwich?

Girl I was coming here to post something like this. And I live in NYC. You MIGHT pay $1,000/month if you live in Harlem/Bed-Stuy/Inwood and have a roommate or two. And your gas/electric could easily be that; we don't pay for water (it's rolled into the rent). You wouldn't need car, but your MetroCard would cost $112/month. Still, even if you would save the $300 in auto insurance and upkeep, you'd still be over your monthly salary working TWO minimum wage jobs at about 80 hours a week.

If you have children, God save you. You're either cramped into an apartment too small for your needs, or your rent is more than your take-home pay.